There are so many Firefox add-ons (which is great) that choosing among them can be difficult. What are your favorites, and why?
I’d personally like feedback on favorites in two areas: (1) security, and (2) add-ons that promise to download all (or selected) multi-media on a given page.
Some of my own favorites are:
Copy Plain Text – Copy text to the clipboard without any formatting.
Flashblock – Automatically blocks all Flash media displays unless clicked on.
Image Zoom – Enlarges those too-tiny images on web pages.
Nuke Anything Enhanced – Allows you to temporarily remove any number of content areas so that you can print only those items you want to see. I use this a lot.
Scrap Book – Easily saves entire web pages or parts thereof in a readily accessible menu, so that you don’t have to save the web pages explicitly on your hard disk. I find this is perfect for saving web reciepts, for example.
Adblock Plus - removes ads individually or by domain, including Flash ads. Customize Google - various options, including removal of sponsored links and ads and an ability to stream all results in one list (instead of having multiple pages, when you scroll to the bottom it loads and appends the next page of results, and so on). FireFTP - FTP client. Gmail Notifier - er, tells you when you have new mail. There’s a good Yahoo! Mail notifier too. IE View - opens pages in IE (for those that absolutely don’t work in Firefox). Menu Editor - customise Firefox context and toolbar menus. Mouse Gestures - wide range of mouse gesture controls. New Tab Homepage - loads your homepage when opening a new tab. NoScript - essential utility allowing you to block or allow active content by page or domain. Right-Click-Link - opens selected text in a new tab (useful where a link is displayed in plain text). Tabs Open Relative - opens tabs to the right of the current one (instead of at the end of the row).
Are you sure that removes Flash animations? I didn’t see that happen for me, at least not out of the box. I had to add-on Flashblock for that, which is nice because it’s easy to allow them to show whenever you want.
AdBlock Plus - You know what this does
ForecastFox - Weather in the browser menus and popup warnings for severe weather
Go to Selection - lets you highlight an unlinked URL and open it in a new tab
StumbleUpon - Nice add on for finding random pages on a particular topic
Text to Image - takes text URLs that contain pictures and just displays them as a picture
Answers 2.2.27 – highlight a word or phrase, right click and it takes you to the definition or explanation at Answers.com. Believe me, it gets used the most right here on this site.
I use the following:
CustomizeGoogle - It enhances google search results, removes Google ads and spam
DownThemAll - A download manager that is great for bulk downloading
FireFTP - An in-browser ftp client
Gmail Manager - Already described
Redirect Remover - Removes redirects from links and clickable images
Tab Mix Plus - An awesome tab manager and enhancer.
UnPlug - Will give you a list with links of all media available to download on a page. Very helpful for pages where flash media is embedded.
StumbleUpon, hands down. I’ve found so much fascinating and/or hilarious stuff with that thing in my free time that I’d almost be willing to pay for it.
Adblock
ForecastFox
Customize Google
IE Tab
CoolIris - mouse over a link and it shows the page in a smaller window then disappears it when you mouse away. Very nice for just checking to see if the link is the one you want.
No Script
Google Toolbar
In addition to what has been mentioned already, I use:
**
IE Tab **- any page opens in IE, but it’s a tab in Firefox Interclue - view links in a little popup window Linkfication - Converts text links into genuine, clickable links. Gmail space - uses gmail account’s storage, looks like a file dump Faviconize Tab - shrinks the tab title to fit a favicon, removes text Download Statusbar - kick ass download toolbar
Is there a Firefox 2.0 add-on that moves the 'X" to close tabs back to the upper right, like it was in Firefox 1.5?
That’s the one thing about 2.0 that drives me nuts - having the ‘X’ on each individual tab, and having to move-click, move-click, move-click, move-click, move-click, if I want to close five consecutive tabs, rather than just moving it to the upper right and going click-click-click-click-click.
StumbleUpon is fantastic; I’ve been using it for a few months.
Incidentally, for the last few months my Gmail was running really, really slowly. I’d click a message and it would take twenty or thirty seconds to display, and if I wanted to reply, probably another ten or fifteen seconds to generate the reply window. I figured this was because I had imported a couple thousand old e-mails from another account, but just yesterday I realized that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that I was using the Better Gmail extension from the folks at LifeHacker. I disabled the extension, and poof! I’m back up to normal Gmail speed. I need to e-mail them about that; I love LifeHacker’s content, but won’t be using Better Gmail anymore.
ETA: RTFirefly, you can close tabs with ctrl-F4 on a PC (not alt-F4!), or command-w on a Mac. I don’t know if that will be helpful to you or not.
Long Titles This one is indispensable for the boards. It allows for the whole amount of thread preview in the mouse-over box when you hover on a thread title.
How you people use these boards without this I’ll never know…
